You can create a free blog on BlogSpot in about ten minutes using Blogger, Google's free blogging service.
You need a Google account, a name for your blog, and a web address.
There is nothing to install, nothing to pay for, and no web hosting to arrange separately.
The fastest path:
- Go to Blogger and sign in with your Google account.
- Open the blog menu near the top left and choose New blog.
- Enter a name for your blog, then click Next.
- Choose your blog address. This becomes
yourname.blogspot.com. - Click Save. The blog exists and is live.
Creating the blog is the easy part.
What decides whether the blog actually works for you is everything around it: picking an address you won't regret, configuring the small number of settings that matter, publishing a first post properly, and knowing where free Blogger stops.
That is what the rest of this guide covers, in the order you'll need it.
A note on menus: Blogger's interface gets adjusted from time to time, and wording can differ slightly depending on your device and language. The labels used here match the current interface. If something reads a little differently on your screen, look for the closest match in the same part of the dashboard — the underlying options have been stable for years.
Blogger and BlogSpot are the same thing, under two names
This confuses nearly every beginner, and a surprising number of tutorials get it wrong by describing BlogSpot as a separate platform.
It isn't.
| Term | What it actually refers to |
|---|---|
| Blogger | The Google service you sign in to.
It gives you the dashboard, the post editor, the themes, and the settings. This is the product. |
| BlogSpot / blogspot.com | The web domain where free Blogger blogs live.
It is an address, not a separate service or a separate account. |
yourname.blogspot.com |
Your individual blog's free web address, formed from the name you choose plus .blogspot.com. |
So "creating a BlogSpot blog" and "creating a Blogger blog" describe the same action.
You sign up on Blogger; your blog is published at a blogspot.com address.
There is no second signup, no second password, and no separate BlogSpot account to create.
The technical name for an address like yourname.blogspot.com is a subdomain.
Google owns blogspot.com, and every free blog gets its own labeled space in front of it — the same way apartments share one building address but each has its own number.
What "free" actually covers
Free here means genuinely free to start and free to keep running a basic blog.
There is no trial period on the core service and no credit card required to create a blog.
Specifically, you get:
- Hosting, included. Hosting is the rented computer space that stores your site and serves it to visitors. Normally you'd pay a company monthly for it. With a blogspot address, Google handles this and you never see it.
- A web address, included. Your
.blogspot.comaddress costs nothing. - A secure connection, automatically. More on this below — it's handled for you.
- Themes, an editor, and image hosting. Your posts and photos are stored with Google.
What free does not include:
- Your own domain name such as
yourname.com. Domains are bought separately from a domain registrar. Blogger lets you connect one you own, but it does not give you one. - An add-on ecosystem. Blogger has built-in features and small components called gadgets. It does not have the large third-party plugin market that self-hosted platforms have.
- Control of the server. You are a guest on Google's infrastructure and bound by Blogger's content policies and terms of service.
Here is how the three realistic options compare:
| Free BlogSpot address | Blogger with a custom domain | Self-hosted site | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ongoing cost | None | Cost of the domain name only | Domain plus hosting, and often paid themes or add-ons |
| Your address | yourname.blogspot.com |
www.yourname.com |
www.yourname.com |
| Who runs the software | You | ||
| Setup difficulty | Very low | Low, plus a one-time DNS step | Moderate to high |
| Design control | Themes, layout, and optional custom code | Same as free | Effectively unlimited |
| Maintenance and updates | None for you | None for you | Your responsibility |
| Moving elsewhere later | Content exports, but the address does not move with you | Content exports and the address moves with you | Full control |
| Best suited to | Starting, learning, testing an idea | A project you've decided to keep | A business or a site you intend to grow indefinitely |
Notice the one row that really matters long term: the address does not move with you. A blogspot address belongs to Blogger.
If you outgrow the platform, your writing comes with you but the links people saved do not.
That is the single strongest argument for a custom domain — and the reason it's worth understanding early even if you don't act on it today.
Three decisions to make before you click "New blog"
You can create a blog without thinking about any of this.
Five minutes here will save you real regret later, because one of these three choices is expensive to reverse.
What is this blog for?
You don't need a business plan.
You need one sentence you could say out loud: "Recipes I actually cook on weeknights." "Notes from my first year of teaching." "Reviews of budget camera gear."
That sentence does a lot of work.
It tells you what to name the blog, what to write first, and — just as usefully — what to leave out.
Blogs that wander across unrelated subjects are harder for readers to follow and harder for search engines to characterize.
You can always broaden later; starting broad and trying to narrow is harder.
Your blog title
The title is the human-readable name that appears at the top of your blog and in browser tabs.
It can contain spaces, capital letters, and punctuation.
The important thing to know: the title is low-stakes. You can change it any time in Settings with no side effects.
Nothing breaks.
So pick something reasonable and move on.
Your blog address
This is the high-stakes one.
The address is the part before .blogspot.com, and it becomes the foundation of every link to your blog — every post URL, every link someone shares, every bookmark.
Changing it later is technically possible, but every existing link to your old address stops working.
If you have published anything at all, that hurts. Treat the address as close to permanent and the title as freely editable.
The two do not have to match, though it helps if they're recognizably related.
A blog titled "The Weeknight Kitchen" at weeknightkitchen.blogspot.com is clean and obvious.
A blog titled "The Weeknight Kitchen" at myblog4food.blogspot.com is a small, permanent source of friction.
What makes a good address:
- Short enough to say out loud without the other person asking you to repeat it.
- Spellable on the first try. Deliberate misspellings and clever substitutions cost you traffic every time someone types the address from memory.
- No numbers or hyphens if you can avoid them. Spoken aloud, "my-blog-2" is ambiguous — hyphen or space, digit or word? Each ambiguity is a chance to lose a visitor.
- Not dated. Addresses containing a year, "new," or "student" age badly and you can't quietly fix them.
- Not painted into a corner.
bestpugphotosis difficult to reuse if you later want to write about dogs generally.
If your first choice is taken: Blogger will tell you immediately, and this is common — the platform has been running since 1999. Resist the urge to bolt a number onto the end. Instead, try a natural variation: add a short, meaningful word (
weeknightkitchenblog), use a phrase that describes the subject differently (fastfamilysuppers), or add your own name (marasweeknightkitchen). A slightly longer address that reads like real language beats a short one with digits stuck on it.
Create your blog
With those decisions made, the creation itself takes a couple of minutes.
-
Sign in to Blogger with your Google account. Any Google account works, including one you already use for Gmail. If you have several accounts, check carefully which one you're signed in as — the blog belongs to that account permanently, and moving a blog between accounts later means adding the second account as an administrator rather than simply transferring it. If you don't have a Google account, you'll be prompted to create one first.
-
Open the blog menu and choose New blog. Look for the down arrow near the top left of the screen. On a brand-new account with no blogs yet, you may instead see a direct prompt to create one.
-
Enter a name for your blog and click Next. This is the title from the previous section — the display name, not the web address. Spaces and capitals are fine. You can change it later.
-
Choose your blog address. Type the address you settled on. Blogger checks availability as you type and tells you if it's already in use. You'll see the full result assembled for you, ending in
.blogspot.com. This is the decision to take seriously. -
Click Save. Your blog is created and publicly viewable immediately, at the address you just chose.
What happens next: you land in the Blogger dashboard.
The blog is real and anyone with the address can visit it — it's just empty.
Nothing has been announced to anyone, and search engines have not necessarily noticed it yet.
Common mistake: creating the blog under a Google account you don't intend to keep — an old school address, a work account you may lose access to, or an account you share. The blog is tied to that account. Sort this out now, while there's nothing to lose.
Finding your way around the dashboard
Everything you'll need lives in the menu down the left side.
Here's what each item is for, so you can stop guessing:
- New post — opens the editor and starts writing.
- Posts — every post you've written, published and draft.
- Stats — how many people have visited. Expect very little at first; that's normal.
- Comments — reader comments, including any waiting for your approval.
- Pages — standing pages such as About and Contact, as opposed to dated posts.
- Layout — arranges the blocks on your blog: sidebar, header, footer, and the small components called gadgets.
- Theme — the overall visual design.
- Settings — the configuration list, covered next.
- Reading list — blogs you follow. Unrelated to your own blog.
You may also see an Earnings item, which relates to showing ads through Google AdSense.
Ignore it for now; it's irrelevant until you have both content and an audience.
Two more things worth locating: the blog switcher at the top left, which matters once you have more than one blog, and the View blog link, which opens your live blog as the public sees it.
You'll use that second one constantly.
If you're on a phone: the Blogger mobile app lets you write, edit, schedule, and publish posts, and add photos and labels. It does not handle themes, layout, pages, comment management, settings, or stats — those require the web dashboard. If a step in this guide seems to be missing from your screen, that's likely why. Do your initial setup on a computer.
The settings worth configuring right now
Open Settings in the left menu.
It's a long list, and that length is exactly why beginners either freeze or start toggling things at random.
Almost none of it matters yet.
These are the ones that do.
Basic
- Title — confirm it reads the way you want. This is what shows at the top of your blog.
- Description — one or two plain sentences about what the blog covers. Skip the slogan; describe the actual subject. Depending on your theme, this may appear under your title, and it helps readers immediately understand where they've landed.
- Blog language — set it to the language you'll write in.
Privacy
- Visible to search engines — this controls whether search engines are allowed to find your blog. If you want readers, make sure it's on. If you're practicing privately and don't want anything indexed yet, turn it off and come back when you're ready.
Formatting
- Time zone — set this before you publish anything, not after. It determines the date stamped on every post, and it's what scheduled posts follow. Getting it wrong means posts dated a day off from reality.
Comments
- Who can comment — you can allow anyone including anonymous visitors, restrict to people with Google accounts, or limit to members of the blog. Restricting to Google accounts is a reasonable default: it cuts down on automated spam without shutting out real readers.
- Comment moderation — turning this on means comments wait for your approval before appearing. On a new blog with few comments, this is easy to keep up with and spares you unwanted content sitting publicly on your site.
Meta tags
- Enable search description — turn this on. It does two things: it lets you write a short summary of the blog as a whole, and it adds a Search description box to the post editor so you can write a summary for each individual post. That box is genuinely useful and it isn't available until you flip this switch.
Permissions
- Reader access — leave this as Public unless you specifically want a private blog. The other options limit reading to blog authors or to a list of people you invite. If your blog is unexpectedly invisible to others later, this is the first setting to check.
Leave these alone for now
You will scroll past all of these.
Every one of them is either irrelevant to a new blog or capable of causing real damage if set wrong:
- Custom robots.txt and custom robots header tags — advanced controls over how search engines crawl your blog. Misconfigured, they can hide your blog from search entirely. The defaults are correct for you.
- Custom redirects and custom 404 — for handling pages you've deleted or moved. You have neither yet.
- Post template — pre-fills every new post with boilerplate. Useful once you have a repeated format; premature now.
- Site feed settings — the defaults work.
- Custom ads.txt — only relevant if you're running ads.
- Google Analytics property ID — worth adding once you have visitors worth analyzing.
- Adult content — only if it genuinely applies to your blog.
A favicon, the small icon shown in browser tabs, is a nice touch you can add whenever you like.
It changes nothing important.
About HTTPS: it's already taken care of
A lot of tutorials instruct readers to go into settings and switch on HTTPS.
On a free blogspot blog, you will look for that switch and not find it, and then wonder what you did wrong.
Nothing. Blogspot addresses always use HTTPS, the encrypted connection that puts the padlock in the browser's address bar.
Because it's automatic and cannot be turned off, Blogger hides the setting entirely on blogs that use a blogspot address.
The HTTPS options only appear if you connect your own custom domain, where a certificate has to be issued for your domain specifically.
So: your free blog is served securely from the moment you create it, and there is nothing to configure.
If a guide tells you otherwise, it's out of date.
Publish your first post
Click New post.
The editor is straightforward — a title field, a large writing area, and a panel of options along the side.
The parts that matter
Title. Write what the post is genuinely about, in the words a person would actually use.
"Five Weeknight Pasta Dinners Under 30 Minutes" tells both readers and search engines what they're getting.
"Some Thoughts" tells nobody anything.
Body. Write it in the editor or paste it in.
Use the toolbar for bold, italics, and links.
Break long text into short paragraphs and use headings for the main divisions of a longer piece — a solid wall of text is much harder to read on a phone, which is where a lot of your readers will be.
Images. Insert them from the toolbar.
Keep files reasonably sized; very large images slow the page down for people on slower connections.
Links. Select the text you want to turn into a link and use the link button.
Once you have several posts, link between related ones — it helps readers find more of your work and helps search engines understand how your blog fits together.
Labels. In the side panel.
Labels are Blogger's version of categories: keywords that group related posts, so a reader can click one and see everything you've written on that subject.
Add one to three per post, and reuse the same ones consistently.
Twenty labels used once each are useless to everybody.
Separate multiple labels with commas.
Permalink. The web address of this specific post.
Blogger builds one automatically from your title, which is usually fine.
You can set a custom one instead — worth doing if your title is very long or contains characters that make an ugly address.
Decide before publishing; changing it afterward breaks any existing links to the post.
Search description. The short summary that may appear beneath your link in search results.
This box only appears if you turned on "Enable search description" in Settings.
Write one or two clear sentences describing what the post delivers.
Search engines don't always use what you write — they sometimes pull text from the page instead — but supplying a good one is worth the fifteen seconds.
The parts you can ignore
Location, and most of what sits under Options, can be left alone.
Scheduling under "Published on" is genuinely useful, but not for your first post — you want to see the result immediately.
Preview, then publish
Click Preview first.
Always.
It opens your post as readers will see it, inside your actual theme, and it catches the things you can't see in the editor: broken spacing, an image that's enormous, a link that doesn't work.
When it looks right, click Publish.
If you're not ready, click Save and it stays a draft.
Published posts aren't locked.
You can edit and update them, or use Revert to draft to pull a post back out of public view while you fix it.
If Publish doesn't work: Blogger will refuse to save a post containing invalid HTML, and shows the errors in the editor. This most often happens after pasting formatted content from a word processor or another website. The fix is to switch the editor to HTML view and look for the flagged problem, or to paste the text without formatting and reapply it in Blogger.
Posts, pages, and labels: how a Blogger blog is organized
Three concepts, easily confused, each with a distinct job:
| What it is | Use it for | |
|---|---|---|
| Posts | Dated entries that appear on your homepage newest first | Your actual writing — articles, updates, recipes, reviews |
| Pages | Standing content with no date, usually linked in the navigation | About, Contact, Privacy Policy — information that stays put |
| Labels | Keywords attached to posts | Grouping related posts so readers can browse by subject |
One limitation worth knowing: you cannot convert an existing post into a page.
Pages are created separately, under Pages in the left menu.
Making your pages actually appear
This is the step that stops more beginners than any other, and most tutorials skip it entirely.
Creating and publishing a page does not automatically put a link to it on your blog.
You have to add the component that displays your pages:
- Go to Layout in the left menu.
- Find the area where you want your page links — typically across the top or in the sidebar — and click Add a Gadget.
- Choose Pages from the list and click Add.
- Tick the pages you want shown, then save the gadget.
- Click Save again at the bottom to save the whole layout arrangement.
Both saves are required.
Missing the second one is why layout changes sometimes seem to vanish.
Once the gadget is in place, you can drag it to a different position, and you can return to it later to show or hide individual pages.
Which pages should you make?
Two are worth having early:
- About — who you are and what the blog covers. Readers who like a post check this next. A few honest sentences beat an empty page.
- Contact — how to reach you. An email address is enough.
A Privacy Policy page is commonly added, and it becomes genuinely relevant once you're collecting email addresses, running ads, or using analytics.
What any particular blog is legally required to publish depends on where you and your readers are located and what data you collect — that's a question for someone qualified to answer it, not a box every blog ticks by default.
Resist making more.
Four empty pages look worse than none.
Pick a theme, then stop
Go to Theme in the left menu.
You'll see a set of themes; choose one and apply it.
Then Customize lets you adjust colors, fonts, backgrounds, and layout width.
That's enough for now.
Two other options exist — editing the theme's HTML directly, and adding your own CSS — and both are real capabilities, which is more than many free platforms offer.
They are also entirely unnecessary for a blog that doesn't have posts yet.
Understanding the split between two menu items saves confusion:
- Theme controls how things look — colors, typography, styling.
- Layout controls where things sit — which blocks appear in the header, sidebar, and footer.
Other gadgets worth adding through Layout once you have a few posts: a labels list, a post archive, a search box, and a short profile.
Add them when they'd have something to display.
The most expensive beginner mistake is here. It is genuinely satisfying to nudge colors and shuffle sidebars, and it produces nothing. People spend a week on their theme and never publish. Pick a theme that isn't ugly, set your colors, and go write. You can redesign at any point, and you'll make better design decisions once you have real content to design around.
Look at your blog the way a visitor will
Open View blog and check it as a stranger would, not as its owner.
Run through this once:
- Does the title at the top read correctly, with no typo?
- Does your first post display properly — spacing intact, images the right size?
- Do your page links appear, and does each one go where it should?
- Does it work on a phone? Open the address on your own phone rather than assuming.
- Click a label. Does it show the right posts?
- Is the comment form behaving the way you configured it?
- Open your blog in a private or incognito window. This shows you what someone who isn't signed in to your Google account sees — a useful check that nothing is accidentally restricted.
That last one catches the most alarming false alarm in blogging: your blog looks fine to you because you're signed in as its owner, while visitors see something different.
How people will actually find your blog
Publishing a post does not put it in front of anyone.
Search engines have to discover it, decide to index it, and then decide it's worth showing for a given search.
None of that is guaranteed, and none of it is instant.
A new blog with no established presence can take weeks to appear in search results, and some pages never rank at all.
Anyone promising otherwise is selling something.
What you can reasonably do:
- Leave "Visible to search engines" turned on. Everything else is pointless without it.
- Write titles that match how people search. Real questions and real phrasings, not wordplay.
- Keep permalinks descriptive. An address containing readable words is better than a string of numbers.
- Use headings inside long posts. They help readers scan and help search engines understand structure.
- Link between your own posts where it's genuinely useful to the reader.
- Write search descriptions for your posts.
- Use labels consistently so related posts cluster together.
- Publish substantial, original work. Thin posts of a hundred words, and pages that duplicate each other, give search engines no reason to prefer you. Copying content from elsewhere is worse than useless — it can put your blog at risk under Blogger's content policies.
- Check it on mobile. Most themes handle this, but verify rather than assume.
When you're ready to go further, Google Search Console is a free tool that shows you which of your pages Google has indexed and which searches are bringing people to you.
Blogger's settings include a link to connect it.
That's a sensible step once you have a handful of posts published — not on day one, when there's nothing to report.
The honest summary: consistent, genuinely useful writing over months is what builds a readership.
Settings help at the margins.
They don't substitute for the writing.
Back up your blog before you need to
This gets left out of nearly every beginner tutorial, and it takes about twenty seconds.
Go to Settings, scroll to Manage blog, and use Back up content.
Blogger produces an XML file containing your posts and comments, which you download and keep.
The matching Import content option restores from that file.
Why bother, when Google is running the servers? Because hosting your work on someone else's platform means accepting their rules and their automated systems.
Accounts and blogs can be flagged, and while a deleted blog can be restored within 90 days, you don't want your only copy of two years' writing to be sitting somewhere you've temporarily lost access to.
This isn't a reason to avoid Blogger — every hosted platform carries the same trade-off.
It's a reason to keep your own copy.
Do it after your first few posts, then whenever you've written something you'd be upset to lose.
When a custom domain starts to make sense
A custom domain is a web address you buy and own, like weeknightkitchen.com, used in place of your blogspot address.
Blogger supports connecting one, and Google does not charge you for the connection — you pay a domain registrar for the domain itself, typically as a yearly fee.
You do not need one to start. Starting on a blogspot address is a perfectly sound decision, and it's the right one if you're still working out whether you'll enjoy blogging or whether the subject holds your interest.
There is no reason to spend money to find that out.
A custom domain becomes worth considering when:
- You've published consistently for a few months and know you'll continue.
- The blog represents a business, a service, or your professional identity.
- You're putting the address on a business card, an invoice, or a résumé.
- You want the freedom to move to a different platform later without losing every link.
That last point is the substantive one.
With a custom domain, if you ever move off Blogger, your address goes with you and your links keep working.
That flexibility is what you're actually buying.
Two practical notes if you do go ahead: the domain must be registered before you can connect it, and Blogger requires the address to include www or another prefix such as blog — a bare yourdomain.com with nothing in front of it can't be used directly, though Blogger offers a redirect option so visitors typing the bare version still arrive.
Connecting a domain involves a one-time change to its DNS records, which is the system that points a domain at the right server.
Your registrar provides that screen, and Blogger tells you what to enter.
Is Blogger the right platform for you?
No platform is best for everyone, and Blogger's strengths and limits are unusually clear-cut.
| If you're a… | Blogger works well because… | Consider alternatives if… |
|---|---|---|
| First-time blogger | You can be publishing today, with nothing to configure and nothing to pay | You already know you need specific advanced features |
| Student | Free with no payment details, and a Google account is likely one you already have | Coursework requires a specific platform |
| Hobby blogger | No maintenance, no renewals, no updates to install — it simply keeps working | Your hobby needs specialized functions like bookings or a shop |
| Testing an idea | Costs nothing to try and nothing to abandon | The test depends on features Blogger lacks |
| Freelancer | A working portfolio and writing sample at no cost; add a domain when work picks up | You need a polished, highly distinctive design as your selling point |
| Small business owner | Fine for a simple news or updates blog alongside your main presence | You need e-commerce, bookings, memberships, or email capture built in |
| Content creator | A stable, searchable archive that isn't buried in a social feed | Your business model depends on paid subscriptions or newsletter tooling |
| Serious long-term publisher | A reasonable place to start and prove the concept | You're building substantial value and want to own the whole stack |
| Technically inclined user | Theme HTML and custom CSS are both available | You want server access, a database, or a plugin ecosystem |
The honest position: Blogger is excellent at removing every obstacle between you and a published post, and that is not a small thing — most blogs fail because they never start.
It is not trying to be a full website platform, and it won't become one.
Starting here and moving later is a normal, sensible path.
Your writing exports; you're not locked in.
Mistakes that cost beginners the most time
- Picking a complicated address. Numbers, hyphens, and creative spellings cause a lifetime of small losses, and the address is the hardest thing to change.
- Confusing the title with the address. The title changes freely. The address effectively doesn't. Treat them very differently.
- Redesigning instead of writing. A week on your theme produces a beautiful empty blog.
- Posting copied content. It won't rank, and it puts your blog at risk under Blogger's content policies.
- Skipping the time zone. Two minutes now, versus every post you ever publish being dated wrong.
- Creating pages and wondering why nobody can see them. They need the Pages gadget added through Layout.
- Making empty pages. A Contact page with no contact details is worse than no page.
- Expecting traffic in week one. It doesn't happen, and the disappointment is what makes people quit.
- Changing the address after publishing. Every existing link breaks. Get it right at the start instead.
- Writing about everything. A blog with no discernible subject is hard for both readers and search engines.
- Never backing up. Twenty seconds, and you'd be very glad of it on the day you need it.
If something goes wrong during setup
The address you want is unavailable. Someone has it.
Blogger has been running a long time, so this is normal for short or common words.
Try a natural variation rather than appending digits.
You can't sign in, or you're not sure which account the blog is on. Google's account recovery covers a forgotten username, a forgotten password, and the case where you can't remember which email address a blog is attached to — for that last one, you can enter the blog's address and get a hint about the connected account.
If you're simply signed in as the wrong person, sign out and back in with the right account.
Blog creation fails. Confirm you're signed in, try a different supported browser — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge are all supported — and make sure yours is up to date.
Extensions and ad blockers occasionally interfere; an incognito window is a fast way to test that.
The dashboard won't load properly. Same checks: update your browser, disable extensions temporarily, clear the cache, or try incognito.
Doing initial setup on a computer rather than a phone browser avoids a whole category of these problems.
A post won't publish. Blogger blocks saving when a post contains invalid HTML, and displays the error.
Pasted content from word processors and other websites is the usual culprit.
Switch to HTML view to find it, or paste as plain text and reformat.
Your blog isn't visible to other people. Check Settings under Permissions: if Reader access is set to "Private to authors" or "Custom readers" instead of Public, only you and people you've invited can see it.
Confirm with an incognito window.
Your pages don't appear. Add the Pages gadget via Layout, as described above, and remember to save both the gadget and the overall layout.
Theme or layout changes don't show up. Confirm you clicked Save — layout changes need saving at the arrangement level as well as within the gadget.
Then reload your blog with a hard refresh, or check in an incognito window, since your browser may be showing you a cached copy.
Your blog isn't in Google yet. Almost always normal rather than broken.
Confirm "Visible to search engines" is on, make sure you have real content published, and give it time.
New blogs are not indexed on demand.
Questions new Blogger users ask
Is Blogger really free?
Yes.
Creating a blog, hosting it, and publishing to a .blogspot.com address cost nothing, with no trial period and no payment details required.
The only thing you'd pay for is a custom domain, which you buy from a registrar and connect if you choose to.
Do I need a Google account?
Yes.
Blogger runs on your Google account, and one is required to create or manage a blog.
Any Google account works, including an existing Gmail address.
What will my blog's address look like?
It takes the form yourname.blogspot.com, where you choose the first part during setup, provided it isn't already taken.
Do I need to buy web hosting?
No.
Hosting is included.
This is the main practical advantage of starting on BlogSpot rather than a self-hosted site.
Can I change my blog's name later?
The title, yes — freely, in Settings, with no consequences.
The address can also be changed, but every existing link to your blog will break, so treat it as a decision to get right the first time.
Can I move to WordPress or another platform later?
Yes.
Use Back up content in Settings to export your posts and comments as an XML file, which other platforms can generally import.
Note that your blogspot address does not transfer — a further reason people eventually move to a custom domain.
How long until my blog shows up in Google?
There's no fixed answer and no guarantee.
Search engines have to discover and index a new blog before it can appear, and that can take weeks.
Making sure "Visible to search engines" is on and publishing genuinely useful content are the two things within your control.
Can I make money from a Blogger blog?
Blogger integrates with Google AdSense, which has its own eligibility requirements and approval process.
It's not something to plan around at the start.
Build an audience first; the question answers itself later.
Your first week
If you've followed along, your blog exists, it's configured, and something is published on it.
That already puts you ahead of most people who intended to start a blog.
A realistic plan for the next few days:
- Publish two or three more posts. Nothing teaches you the editor like using it, and a blog with one post has nothing for a reader to do next.
- Write your About page and make sure it's visible through the Pages gadget.
- Settle on five or six labels that cover your subject, and use those consistently instead of inventing new ones each time.
- Run one backup from Settings so you know where the option is.
- Check the blog on your phone and fix anything that reads badly there.
- Leave the theme alone. Revisit it in a month, when you have real content to design around.
After that, the only thing that matters is publishing regularly.
Everything else in this guide is scaffolding around that one habit.
Thanks for reading! How to Create a Free Blog on BlogSpot (complete CMS guide) you can check out on google.